Obama fever grips Kenya

Laurie GoeringTribune correspondent

KOGELO, Kenya — Yuanita Obiero, the principal of Senator Obama Secondary School, proudly wears an Obama campaign button on her blouse. But she admits to one big worry: If this village's most famous descendant wins the U.S. presidency Tuesday, the tin-roofed school will have to change its name.

Turning Kogelo Secondary School into Senator Obama Secondary School, after Barack Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2004, took two years, she said. If he becomes president, "we cannot leave it the way it is," she lamented. But "maybe this time they can do it faster."

Nowhere outside the United States is Tuesday's presidential election more eagerly awaited than in Kenya, where Obama is claimed as a native son thanks to his Kenyan father, who died in a car crash in 1982.

Oversize television screens were being erected around the country Monday so Kenyans can watch the U.S. returns live.

Last week, thespians in Nairobi put on a production of, "Obama the Musical." The prime minister and 10 Cabinet ministers endorsed Obama's candidacy, and people in the streets paraded in Obama T-shirts.

"Party mood as Obama on course for victory," read a front-page headline in Monday's edition of The Standard, one of Kenya's leading newspapers.

"It's almost like he's being elected right here," observed Stephan Otieno, a youth organizer in Kisumu, the largest city in lush western Kenya, where either huge street parties—or protests—are expected after U.S. election returns come in.

In Kogelo, a tiny village near the shores of Lake Victoria where the extended Obama clan farms corn and beans, road crews were busy widening and smoothing the road leading to town, in anticipation of visits by top Kenyan officials.

A squadron of 24 police and security officers camped out beneath the trees in the yard of Obama's 87-year-old stepgrandmother, trying to hold at bay a growing flood of reporters from around the world.

Sarah Onyango Obama's modest concrete-block home now sports a woven-wire security fence and imposing metal gates, installed after thugs attempted to steal her solar panels, used to power the television she uses to watch her grandson's political progress.

Residents of the village, not far from the equator, said they weren't counting on a President Obama bringing too much change to Kogelo, what with him not actually being a Kenyan politician.

But "we hope he'll be able to sell Africa in a different light," said Felix Obama, a 23-year-old stepnephew of the presidential nominee. A U.S. president with roots in rural Africa, he said, would surely have a different view on the need for development around the world.

The Obama name hasn't done much to assist him personally, however, he said. Years after graduating from high school, he remains among Kenya's legions of unemployed.

"People say, 'If you're related to the U.S. president, why do you have to come here looking for work," he said.

At Kogelo's medical dispensary, residents from throughout the area flocked Monday to a mobile HIV testing and treatment van plastered with posters showing the U.S. senator being tested for AIDS in the same van during a 2006 visit to Kenya.

"People see Obama on the poster and they say, 'We have to get this test,' " said Emily Ogwang, 32, a health worker. "They see Obama as a role model now."

Among the inspired are students at Senator Obama Secondary who look at Obama's successes and "feel it will open avenues for them to go outside and be like him," said Obiero, the principal.

On Election Night, she said, the whole student body of 144 is expected to pack the schoolyard to watch the returns.